This invention pertains to digital communications and more particularly is concerned with isochronous channel interfaces.
Digital communications isochronous channel interfaces offer the capability of adapting, at the channel input, data from a source that is not synchronized to the channel and restoring the data, at the channel output, to its original condition. A typical source is telemetry that is generating a continuous data stream timed independently of the channel clock source and that is often unstable with momentary rate perturbations. To be successful, the source data rate must be lower than the channel traffic rate. One technique employs stuff bits to fill the gap between the rates. The stuff bits are identified and discarded during data recovery at the channel output. Channel traffic rates are available in discrete increments and force the system designer to the next available increment above the telemetry data rate, thus often causing costly overhead.
Consider an interface between two networks wherein one network has a clearly specified frequency reference but the other network does not. The timing characteristic of the second network is unknown. The interface should accommodate any timing condition, including unpredictable drift. Since the data is not digitized analog where resampling is a solution, an isochronous process is required.
Two current techniques to accommodate an isochronous interface are bit stuffing and oversampling. Both techniques require that the source data rate be lower than the channel traffic rate. The difference between the data rate and the channel rate is called the overhead. The bit stuffing approach requires moderate overhead of 10 to 20%. The overhead is used for framing of the data and for identification of the stuff bits so that they can be removed accurately at the channel output. The actual overhead is often higher since many networks and components have incremental channel traffic rate configuration capability.
For example, consider a 64 kbps +5% data rate to be interfaced to an ISDN channel. A 20% framing and bit stuffing overhead would raise the required channel traffic rate to 80 kbps. However, the next incremental traffic rate available on the ISDN channel is 128 kbps, therefore 100% overhead is incurred.
The oversampling technique is effective for very low rate data streams since the data is sampled at several times the data rate. The transitions of the data are sensed and transmitted for reconstruction at the output of the channel. This technique is very high in overhead and appends an inherent jitter onto the reconstructed data.